In the middle of a round-the-world trip, Richmond’s Duncan Goose found his vocation in life – helping others in the midst of crisis.
There are not many residents of the borough who would confess that they are happiest when sitting in the dirt in a remote part of Africa with no phone or radio signals, but this is apparently true of the person I am meeting today. Duncan Goose is the founder of Global Ethics Ltd, the company behind One, the bottled water brand that donates all of its profits to funding life-changing water projects in Africa.
In a quiet backstreet of Richmond, I find the office of Global Ethics and there is no mistaking I have come to the right place; from gigantic colourful photographs lining the walls, beautiful African children smile down at me, their eyes gleaming with joy as they fill up their buckets at water pumps and pose happily with bottles of One. And when I am introduced to the man who is responsible for transforming so many of these children’s lives, I can’t help but notice that his eyes are sparkling too.
Duncan Goose (48) was born in Edinburgh where he lived with his family until he was ten. His father worked as a plastic surgeon before deciding that he spent too much time in the operating theatre and relocated the family to Norfolk to become a GP. Duncan tells me that he always dreamed of becoming a doctor like his father.
“Unfortunately, I’m not quite as smart as he is and I failed to get the grades I needed to study medicine,” he says modestly. “Purely by chance I started doing an internship in a marketing department of a big commercial refrigeration company and that really opened my eyes; it was an introduction to the world of business and I found it hugely exciting.”
Following this, Duncan took the decision to study business at Birmingham Polytechnic and in the summer holidays found himself some work experience at a creative marketing agency in London.
“I absolutely loved it and ended up being offered a permanent job. My tutors told me it was too good an opportunity to turn down even though it meant not completing my course.”
Duncan moved to London and worked there for three years before moving to another marketing agency in Richmond where he stayed for six years.
Although he adored his job, a book he was reading called Jupiter’s Travels was to have a profound effect on him.
“It was an amazing account of Ted Simon’s motorbike odyssey around the world in the 1970s. I had always loved riding motorbikes and I had never really travelled and I felt compelled to do it; I suppose you could call it an early midlife crisis,” he laughs. So in 1998 at the age of 30, Duncan sold his house in Twickenham, bought a motorbike and set off on his expedition.
“I had no map and no route, I wanted to discover the world as an adventurer. I planned to be away for just a few months but it ended up being two years.”
While he was in Honduras, Duncan found himself caught up in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch.
“It was an incredible experience to see the destructive power of nature and also the amazing resilience of people,” he explains. “Everything was broken and yet there was still this desire by the communities to get back on their feet. It really was a huge insight into what happens in disasters.”
When he returned from his travels, Duncan went back to work at the marketing agency but he felt changed from his experiences.
“Richmond is such a beautiful place and you couldn’t get a more extreme view of nice, easy life versus the life I had seen while I was away. But I wasn’t sure how to address that; I didn’t just want to give money to charity every year and I didn’t want to become an aid worker. I needed to find some way of bridging the two worlds that I loved – the world of business and the world of development and that’s really what gave birth to the brand of One.”
At the end of 2004, Duncan gave up his job to set up Global Ethics.
“The idea was simply to create a bottled water brand and give away the profit to fund the provision of clean water in the world’s poorest communities. Because I had lived out of a motorbike for two years and could survive on nothing but a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, I was happy to throw away all of my life again to make it work. I was really passionate; there were a billion people in the world with no access to clean water and two million people dying every year from water-related diseases, most of these children under the age of five, and
I wanted to change that.”
Whilst he was setting up the business, Duncan tells me how he went through all his savings and borrowed money from friends and family before landing a lucky break in June 2005.
“I was at the bottling plant in Wales, seeing the very first water bottles off the production line, when one of my friends rang to tell me that Bob Geldof had just announced the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park as part of the Make Poverty History campaign. He told me that I needed to go and see Bob Geldof and I laughed.”
But that’s exactly what he did. Duncan drove straight back to London with cases of water in his car and delivered them to Bob Geldof, Harvey Goldsmith and Richard Curtis.
“One became the official water for Live 8 and Make Poverty History and, on July 2, was globally televised in the hands of Brad Pitt and on the stage of Pink Floyd and everyone else. It was an amazing way to start, the brand was potentially seen by billions of people.”
The problem at this point was that Duncan didn’t actually have any distribution channels in place.
“It took a while to say to people – ‘we’re here, we exist and this little bottle of water really can save someone’s life’.”
Total petrol stations became their first customers in autumn 2005, followed closely by Co-op, Waitrose and Morrisons. From there the brand just grew and Duncan now has a team of 11 staff working for him in Richmond. Alongside the still and sparkling spring waters, a variety of juiced water and flavoured water ranges have been introduced and, to date, The One Foundation has given away a staggering £14.5 million, changing the lives of over three million people.
“I really do have the best of both worlds; I get to run a business, which is hugely challenging and exciting and yet we also get to give away millions of pounds to impact on people’s lives.”
I wonder how Duncan feels when he goes out to Africa and sees the effect his work is having.
“It is usually a mixed set of emotions. It’s always good to celebrate the positive change in a community’s existence, but you are always looking for faster and better ways of doing things. It can also be deeply emotional especially when you talk to mothers who have lost children. I remember sitting in northern Kenya with a lady who had just lost a baby through cholera at the same time my son was born; that was pretty hard to take.”
I ask Duncan if any particular project really stands out for him.
“In 2011, a severe drought hit East Africa and the word was that it was going to be another Ethiopia disaster. We managed to put a million pounds on the ground within four days, which kept a quarter of a million people alive long enough before other governments stepped in. It took me back to my time in Honduras and the realisation that if you don’t act very quickly, you will have a huge problem.”
As well as leading One on its commitment to give away £20m by 2020, this philanthropist is also in the midst of another huge campaign.
“At the moment we are working hard on something called the Global Investment Fund for Water. The idea is that if we could get every bottled water company in the world to find a way to give up one US cent per litre of water sold, that would add up to $4 billion a year. We are working with a lot of governments and development agencies to find ways of making that happen and over the last few years it has come closer and closer to becoming a reality.”
Duncan lives in Kew with his Italian wife, a doctor and leading expert on HIV and their two children, aged six and four. Not surprisingly, the couple is keen to instil in their children a strong sense of responsibility from an early age.
“We will wait to take them to Africa until they a bit older but they are already aware that although we may have a very privileged life, there are plenty of people who don’t and it is good to help them.”
Even when he is at home with his family, Duncan never switches off from his life mission.
“It doesn’t stop just because it’s the weekend or Christmas; there’s a kid that dies every day because of lack of access to clean water and that’s wrong. It’s a hard thing to carry around with you, but it’s the life I have chosen and I wouldn’t swap it.”
For more information about One check out onedifference.org/en_UK
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